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Pure Functional Programming in Excel • Felienne Hermans • GOTO 2016

GOTO Conferences · 25.6K views · 2016-08-09 · 43:16

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Overview

Felienne Hermans argues that Excel is the world's most popular programming language and shows how spreadsheets work as a pure functional language. She implements a few mathematical problems in spreadsheet formulas to illustrate why they are so powerful and approachable.

On Hacker News

HN commenters point to it whenever Excel, spreadsheets or functional programming come up, as a fun and serious take on spreadsheets as real programming.

Recommended by 5 HN people across 5 months · HN mentions 2017–2025

Topics

Functional programmingSoftware (other)
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excelspreadsheetsend-user programmingfelienne hermans

What people said

rzzzt · 2020-05 · Strong recommendation

OT, but Felienne has a great talk on functional programming in Excel (thanks for reminding me of her name): [VIDEO]

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robertknight · 2024-01 · Recommendation

Related to this, I recommend Felienne Hermans' talks on Excel as a functional programming language - [VIDEO] .

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ggrrhh_ta · 2021-02 · Recommendation

This is the talk that I first saw that builds on that: [VIDEO] I found it interesting, fun and great. Still, I would stick to using Excel for the personal analysis of data and not as the language/tool on which software is developed: data & programming logic intermixed, the default way to index cells, the difference between normal cells and array cells, and tables, etc., the fact that some things are just not possible to do fully programmatically without creating your own VB functions and therefore asking recipients of what looks like data to accept running arbitrary code in their machines, etc.

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Sources

Video by GOTO Conferences, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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